Turning an urn all blue by replacement
Question
An urn starts with two red balls and one blue ball. On each turn a ball is drawn uniformly at random and, whatever its colour, it is put aside and a blue ball is put in its place. What is the expected number of turns until every ball in the urn is blue?
Short answer
. Each red ball has to be drawn once. With two reds present a draw hits red with probability (mean wait ); with one red left the chance is (mean wait 3). Adding the geometric waits gives .
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Expectation, Mean, and Variance
- Conditional Expectation and Variance Revisited
- Continuous Random Variables and Probability Density Functions
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